Customers

Our customer is a leading provider of eBilling and eStatement solutions to telecom, banking, insurance, utilities and other industries. Apart from the basic details of consumer, amount and deadline, eBills generated by the software carried instructions on how to pay the bill with credit card, debit card, bank transfer, ewallet and UPI. We recommended the addition of QR code to enable 1-tap payment of bills. The standard QR supports ewallet and UPI payments. While BharatQR supports QR-based card payments, it has failed to take off, so the QR code on most bills supports only ewallet and UPI. With the proliferation of digital payments via eWallets and UPI payment apps like Walmart PhonePe and Google Pay, QR codes became ubiquitous. This created a new breed of “QRcomaniacs” (pronounced quirkomaniacs) who compulsively scan every QR code they see. They found it convenient to scan the QR and make the payment instantly with ewallet or UPI as soon as they received their eBills instead of waiting until the last date to make payments via NEFT, cheque or cash. This helped them avoid late payment fees and costly reconnection charges if they missed the payment deadline. Earlier collections led to better cash flows and lower working capital costs for the biller. Accordingly, QR code became a 10X feature. By incorporating a blockbuster feature even before the market asked for it, our customer was able to elevate its thought leadership positioning to the next level and thereby increase revenues from existing customers and improve win-rates of new bids.

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This SAAS vendor faced abnormal churn in the weeks following new customer acquisition and reached out to us for assistance. Our analysis nailed its use of Excel as the root cause of the problem. During the presales cycle, the vendor was able to persuade its prospects that its SAAS was 10X better than their existing Excel-based processes. However, the first thing prospects saw after becoming customers was Excel – to enter master data. This caused massive cognitive dissonance and drove many customers to cancel their SAAS subscriptions and go back to their previous Excel toolkit. It’s not a secret that the use of Excel results in poor data quality, incorrect classification of hierarchical entities, and additional efforts for reconciling the entered data with “true” data. However, Excel is fast, convenient and lenient with data errors. These advantages have made Excel the go-to tool for master data entry where a large amount of data needs to be entered in a short period of time. In contrast, data entry screens in software are slow, require the use of the mouse, and throw off validation errors that break data entry rhythm. Although they carry out validation and ensure high quality of data, native screens are purpose-built for entering small amounts of transaction data over a long period of time. This runs counter to the need for entering large quantities of master data in a short period of time during the master data collection phase of implementation of a new software. To overcome this dilemma, we proposed the addition of a dedicated master data collection module to the SAAS. The new “Onboarding Wizard” comprised new screens and logic for entering the data in bulk and validating it in batch and thereby ditched the use of the existing transaction entry screens for the ill-suited purpose of entering master data. The module delivered the speed and convenience of Excel while ensuring that the quality of the entered data was on par with that entered via native screens. This eliminated cognitive dissonance and enhanced usage. Onboarding Wizard paid back its development cost many times over by improving net dollar retention rate and increasing monthly subscription revenues.

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To comply with the government’s “Aadhaar Seeding” regulation, this leading universal bank in India needed to seed bank accounts with customers’ Aadhaar details. (For the uninitiated, Aadhaar is a biometric identity provided by government agency UIDAI for citizens of India.) In this pursuit, the bank executed an omnichannel campaign targeted at its customers. Run via SMS, email and sign-on banner on the bank’s Internet Banking portal, the goal of the campaign was to drive Aadhaar Seeding by retail and business banking customers. After running the campaign for a few months, the bank failed to move the needle on compliance. It was on the verge of buying paid ads to bolster compliance when we entered the scene. We did a test drive of the campaign and spotted many friction hotspots. For one, the banner copy – “Please link your Aadhaar to your bank account to ensure continuity of account access” – was very weak. After all, banking is the life blood of any business and loss of access to a bank account would be a catastrophe for any company, so the sugarcoated message actually lulled people into a false sense of comfort, when it was supposed to do exactly the opposite thing. Secondly, when business banking customers logged in to Internet Banking, they saw the same banner as retail banking customers. This flummoxed them since companies don’t have Aadhaar Card (which is issued only to individuals). We then found out that the campaign was also addressed to customers who had completed their Aadhaar Seeding in response to a similar campaign that was aborted midway a few years earlier. When these customers clicked the link to update Aadhaar on the banner, they saw their Aadhaar Number being displayed on the following page. Naturally they didn’t know how to proceed but were still bombarded with an unending barrage of SMS and email messages goading them to complete Aadhaar Seeding at the earliest. In short, not many customers could fulfill the campaign’s Call To Action, which explained why it performed poorly. We progressed to the next phase of our engagement, which was to eliminate all friction hot spots. We applied the Loss Aversion principle of consumer behavior to transform the copy to “Not linked your Aadhaar to your bank account? Your account will be blocked”. We then removed the confusion faced by business banking customers by adding a line in their sign-on banners to explain that Aadhaar referred to the Aadhaar Number of the company’s “Authorized Signatory” (who, being individuals, do have Aadhaar Card). Having deliberately chosen negative copy, we handled the campaign with kid gloves by targeting it only at those customers whose Aadhaar Seeding was pending. At the end of the journey, we provided positive reinforcement by congratulating customers for completing their Aadhaar Seeding. The combination of negative copy, crystal clear instructions and accurate targeting led to manifold increase in conversion of NetBanking visitors to Aadhaar Seeders. This obviated the need for paid ads and helped the bank to cut its compliance cost.

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The customer began its journey as the supplier of corporate gifts to midsize and large companies, who used them to reward their wholesalers, distributors, dealers, retailers, and agents aka “trade” for achieving their quota and on other occasions. Corporate gifting is driven chiefly by the purchase department of a corporate. The firm exited what’s widely regarded as a dirty business and pivoted into an IT company by using technology to mediate the corporate gifting process. It developed a rewards redemption software platform based on state-of-the-art technology. Although the software had a wide range of features appealing to multiple stakeholders in target companies, the company was inevitably deflected to the purchase department because it operated in the corporate gifts domain. This is when the firm engaged us to reposition its platform in order to change its appeal for its target market comprising Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), and other verticals. We found out that rewards shrinkage is a major pain area for midsized to large companies in almost all these industries. Shrinkage happens in the rewards journey when gifts meant for someone don’t reach that someone, for a variety of reasons including loss in transit, poor data quality and – ahem – outright theft. Rewards shrinkage causes channel disgruntlement and undermines a company’s trade promotion budget. We knew from our past work that trade promotion is a big line item of cost for most companies in our target markets. Based on this knowledge, we divined that improving trade promotion utilization would drive substantial ROI. Armed with this insight, we created a Marketable Item that positioned the reward redemption platform as a way track the movement of gifts through various stages of a company’s distribution channel, thus minimizing shrinkage and maximizing bang for the company’s trade promotion buck. We then developed email flyer, microsite, cheatsheet, and a range of other marketing collateral to amplify the message contained in our Marketable Item. Finally, we coached the company’s inside sales and field sales orgs on the Marketable Item and Content so that they could run outbound and inbound marketing campaigns to generate leads and close deals. Our workproducts elevated the software to the C-Suite of our customer’s target audience and thereby accelerated sales cycles and boosted the ticket size. This engagement is also testimony of how nontech companies can leverage the “Software Is The Brand” (SITB) strategy to digitally transform themselves and reap the opportunities created by the pandemic in the era of “new normal”.

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A midsized IT company wanted to develop a new Configure-Price-Quote product and engaged us to provide specifications for its Minimum Viable Product version. CPQ is a category of software used to support the configuration, pricing and quotation generation activities that accompany solution and negotiated selling. Since the product category was well established, we couldn’t get away with an MVP that had a fraction of the feature set of the incumbent leaders. At the same time, it was not feasible to build out a fully fledged CPQ product in a realistic timeframe. The only way out of this classic product management conundrum was to outflank the existing products. We did that by using an “AHA” moment in our product. Most of the existing crop of products, built prior to the social selling era, did a great job of helping a salesperson to configure his product, price it, discount it, convert to a proposal, and submit it to the prospect. Our CPQ was conceptualized and developed in the social selling era. We leveraged this zeitgeist and devised ways for our product to do more than just prepare a quote and, in the process, strike at our competitors’ legacy background. Influencer Sphere was the result. Our sales experience told us that any contact given in an RFP is more of an admin person who receives proposals from multiple vendors, collates them, prepares a comparison table and forwards it to the committee of decision makers. We were also aware that influencers are rarely exposed in the RFP document. Top performing sales people always find and map these decision makers before others do, which is how they go beyond merely participating in RFP exercises to consistently win more deals. Influencer Sphere empowered all sales reps to become top performers. Using information from social media and proprietary resources, Influencer Sphere would identify all influencers and decision makers for a given deal. It would then unravel the web of connections between them and the sales rep. In this fashion, Influencer Sphere would help all sales reps to map the prospect organization faster and get warm introductions to decision makers from their own coworkers. This would obviously boost their chances of winning the deal. This AHA moment helped our customer position its CPQ product as “sales booster” and thereby outflank incumbents whose products were merely “quotation makers”.

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Coming from the advertising industry, the founders of this startup were deeply exposed to the tradeshow business. They were fully familiar with the pain areas faced by tradeshow exhibitors and desired to use technology to solve them. At first, they took the “go wide” approach, and developed a tightly integrated suite of multiple modules across the across pre-, during- and post-tradeshow phases. This approach landed the company a few marquee customers. But it also entailed multiple touchpoints with CRM, Marketing Automation, Email Marketing and other systems in a typical customer’s existing IT landscape. Realizing astutely that this implementation challenge could eventually crimp future growth of their startup, the founders deftly pivoted their company to “go deep”. Under the new approach, the startup decided to develop a few point solutions, each addressing a specific pain area of exhibitors and visitors in discrete phases of the tradeshow participation lifecycle. During both its “go wide” and “go deep” approaches, the startup consulted with us at key stages of product development. Using our domain knowledge and product management expertise, we provided guidance on positioning and high level functionality, weighed in on detailed features, recommended tweaks to User Interface and User Experience, drove frugal engineering principles by suggesting integrations with third party services to leverage preexisting features, and so on.

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While managing this Payment Solutions Provider’s marketing campaign, we noticed a sudden drop in volume of appointments set by its Inside Sales team. Among the reasons proferred to explain the problem were “holiday season”, “people are busy with budgeting for next year”, and so on. While we took those usual suspects at face value, we decided to focus our attention on factors that were within our control. We measured key metrics at various stages of the funnel e.g. Dial Volume, Right Person Connect, etc. When we compared them with industry benchmarks, we found Dial Volume significantly lagging best practices. To find out the root cause of the problem, we sat in with the inside sales team as they were making outbound calls to contacts in their target lead list. As Western markets entered peak business hours, delivery teams at the company’s HQ would make back-to-back conference calls over the next 3-4 hours with overseas customers. This raised the overall noise level in the open plan office. Fearing that prospects on the other side of their telephone calls might get annoyed by the high level of ambient noise, the inside sales team sharing the same office decided to suspend its outbound calling activity during this period. While this was a sensible decision under the circumstances, the “local optima” solution led to the unintended consequence of drastically bringing down the volume of qualified leads and appointments. Ideally, inside sales should have operated from a closed office so that it was shielded from surrounding disturbances. However, the team was comprised of relatively junior people who didn’t feel empowered to approach their management to request for a separate room. Their managers were located overseas and couldn’t be expected to know about the nitty gritty of infrastructure issues at their HQ premises. Therefore, we took it upon ourselves to intervene with the company’s leadership to get the inside sales team moved to a closed office. With no more disturbance, the inside sales team almost doubled its dial volumes. This resulted in a sharp increase in downstream KPIs like qualified leads and appointments.

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During the course of 10+ years of its existence, this IT company had created a midsized services business. While executing engagements in a few select domains, the company had gathered massive expertise and built proprietary frameworks in certain areas. The company’s leadership wanted to translate the capability and IP accumulated over the years into a fully fledged product, which would not only help the company move up the IT value chain but also enhance its market cap. With this goal, the company approached us to help identify potential areas for productization, narrow down on one product and develop specs for it. (With prior background in products, the company’s leaders knew that the product business required tremendous investment in marketing and had the budget for only one product.) We began the engagement by doing a deep dive into the company’s portfolio of projects. We then grouped its existing assets into leading clusters like Contract Management, Internet of Things and CRM. We rated the attractiveness of each asset category by market size, ticket size, marquee references, functional coverage, presence in target market, and other attributes. We then selected one category for productization. We then created a shortlist of many brand names for the new product and worked with the company to select one based on its descriptiveness of its genre, domain name availability, pronounceability, and other criteria. We then prepared specifications for the first version of the product, identified potential customers for the product from among the company’s existing customers and set up its product management organization to take over from us after the initial period of hand holding. Our specs were guided by state-of-the-art API-based architecture, cutting edge UX, social media and “next generation” practices in the product category.

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This midsized IT services company has an inside sales team with 20+ SDRs that run outbound marketing campaigns to midsized businesses in USA, Europe and Australia. The company owed its initial growth to aggressive outreach supported by world-class content around Application Development & Maintenance, Web Development, Support and other technology offerings. Over time, this approach failed to provide the company with any discernible differentiation from other offshore IT services companies. As a result, it started facing mounting challenges in filling its pipeline. It was at this stage that the company turned to us for help. We used our proven methodology with a solid track record of solving this problem at other IT services companies. We started off by creating a set of Marketable Items that packaged the company’s strengths around industry hot topics and business pain areas and thereby provided a compelling reason for prospects to buy the company’s services. For each Marketable Item, we developed email flyer, microsite, offering detail presentation, SEM ad copy, social media updates, and other content. We then used campaign management best practices to go to market with the latest offerings. We first used a Cheat Sheet to launch the Marketable Items to the company’s Inside Sales team. We then coached all team members on latest tactics to accelerate the compilation of Target Lead Lists, increase outreach, get past gatekeepers, overcome objections, drive the first meeting agenda, and so on. Finally, once the campaigns were kicked off, we conducted weekly reviews of dial volumes, right person connect rates, number of appointments, proposal requests, etc. Based on these inside sales metrics, we flagged off potential issues before they became serious problems and initiated midcourse corrective action driven by industry best practices. For example, when we found that dial volumes were lagging industry benchmarks, we traced the problem to a slowdown in Target Lead List compilation. In order to accelerate the pace of the campaign, we recommended the purchase of readymade contacts from leading B2B contact databases. Over the next few months, our campaign management helped improve the effectiveness of the company’s Inside Sales team and increase the flow of its qualified leads.

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Headquartered in the US Midwest, NETECH CORP provides networking infrastructure solutions that help SAP users save money and increase productivity. The company was planning to conduct a roadshow to showcase its offerings to existing SAP sites. To maximize participation for the event, its sales managers decided to reach out to SAP customers proactively and invite them for the roadshow. To kickoff the proposed email-cum-telephone campaign, the company needed contact information of SAP customers in the target region (Michigan, USA). Our SAP Mailing List fit its requirements perfectly for several reasons: It delivered the required information readily, so the company’s account executives could immediately launch their outreach campaign; it supported state-wise selection, thus permitting the company to buy only the contacts it needed.

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This veteran from the Enterprise Application space launched a new ERP services company. To spread awareness of the company’s offerings, he proposed to conduct an outreach campaign targeted at existing SAP customers in the USA. To kickoff the proposed email-cum-telephone campaign, the company needed contact information of SAP customers in the USA. It selected our SAP Mailing List for its high quality, competitive price and moneyback guarantee.

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This JV between India’s leading automobile manufacturer and Germany’s largest insurer offers a wide range of insurance solutions to consumers and businesses. The company uses integrated marketing to drive sales of its automobile, health, householders and other general insurance products. Traditional marketing includes print and outdoor ads. Digital marketing comprises of banner ads, SEO, etc. QR codes are used to transition prospective customers from physical to digital media. GTM360 recommended the following omnichannel Conversion Rate Optimization techniques to the company: (1) Integrate information entered by prospective customers on banner ads to the company’s digital sales portal so as to minimize abandonment caused by the blank form shown earlier (2) Distribute Tweet, Print, Rate and many other CTAs on the purchase confirmation page across different pages (3) Prefill registration forms on the websites of hospitals, wellness centers and so on, thus boosting cross-sell of add-on products and services (4) Trigger mobile app installs via QR codes in print ad, website and policy document (5) Omnichannel-enable policy issuance system so that minor irritants in the customer journey – e.g. customers who have already renewed online still receive multiple email reminders from sales urging them to renew their policies ASAP! – don’t tarnish the brand image. By implementing our suggestions, the insurer expects to increase conversion of readers / website visitors to customers.

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This Learning Content Management Software vendor ported its onpremise software to the cloud, treating the migration as a simple change in deployment method not meriting of any change in functionality. A year after going live, the SaaS version had managed to acquire just 5% of the potential user base. This seriously challenged the company’s revenue projections and it approached us for guidance. After a detailed demo of the software and its customer implementations, we were able to nail the root cause of the problem: It had to do with a set of legacy features around new user addition that were carried forward unchanged from the onpremise to the cloud version. In the past, the vendor would contract for a certain number of user licenses of its onpremise software and collect the License Fee in advance. Any new user addition needed to go through an offline process for approval of additional licenses. This required a lot of information including justification for using the software. Therefore, under this regime, it made sense for the vendor to design its onpremise version in such a way that it blocked automatic addition of new users and sought all the information required to support the new license approval request. Now, when it came to the SaaS version, there was no offline approval process. Billing happened on a pay-per-use basis. It was to the vendor’s advantage to make it easy to allow new users to sign up to use its software. However, when potential new users clicked the sign up button, they saw the same old long form and encountered the previous mulitstep registration process. This frustrated users who were used to a more frictionless onboarding process with other cloud software. As a result, many of them abandoned the signup process, which led to muted adoption of the SaaS software. This was essentially a product issue that manifested itself as a marketing symptom. To address it, we urged a revamp of the new user onboarding process. According to our specs for the new functionality, adding a new user became as simple as entering an email address. The software fetched the user’s name, department, cost center, location and other required information from the site’s active directory, packaged them into a new user request and forwarded it automatically to the respective SBU head for approval. When implemented, our “growth hack” set the stage for a manifold increase in user count and rapid rise in subscription revenues.

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With a solid track record of providing development and testing services for one of the largest streetworks systems in the United Kingdom, this midsized IT services company gained substantial expertise and experience on this niche offering. Meanwhile, there was an exponential growth in demand for this service on the back of a massive increase in public utilities and their subcontractors impacted by ongoing regulation. On the face of it, this market presented a huge opportunity for our customer to drive its future growth. However, there was a major hurdle in the way: Fueled by the manifold increase in market size, local competition had mushroomed. To make much headway under the new market reality, it was vital for the company’s visibility to reach the next level. We discussed various strategies for doing this. Mass-media advertising was immediately ruled out because it was too broadbased – not to mention costly – for this service’s narrowly-defined target market. SEM and SEO were ineffective in getting the company found by the rather insular nature of target audience for this offering. After detailed deliberations with its leadership, we chose thought leadership as the vehicle for boosting the company’s visibility. We then explored various subjects around which to share the company’s perspective and finally decided on EToN6 (Electronic Transfer of Noticing version 6). For one, compliance with this latest standard of applications and permits was made mandatory by HM Department for Transport, thus creating a lot of natural buzz for the term within the target market. Secondly, EToN6 served as the most suitable launch pad for the company to assert its “street cred” since it had already bagged a project for providing the required migration services. We wrote up an article on the potential of the new electronic standard to vault the nation to a global leadership position and the pivotal role played by the company in getting there. We then identified several trade journals and worked with them to establish the company’s accomplishments in this space. We got our article accepted by a leading British publication that hosted a highly engaged community of over 4,500 streetworks professionals. When the article was published, it immediately projected our customer as a thought leader in front of thousands of executives who decided on purchase of streetworks technology for hundreds of public utilities, contractors and construction companies.

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This leading business process consulting firm based out of the US East Coast was commissioned by a large American bank to provide procurement intelligence services. The engagement was driven by the need to contain costs of procuring application development and maintenance (ADM) services from India. The consultancy approached us for help with domain expertise in BFSI IT services. Mindful that the client – and the entire banking industry to which it belonged – was a very early adopter of offshoring, we correctly gauged that cost arbitrage alone would be passe in its context. Accordingly, we went beyond a simplistic onsite-offshore engagement model to expose new areas of cost containment via Middle India delivery and optimization of team composition. These levers for negotiating with vendors helped the client to cut its IT procurement costs without risking a move to untried offshore destinations.

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Kotak Mahindra Bank is one of the fastest growing and most admired financial institutions in India. Since its inception as a nonbanking financial company in 1985 and as a bank in 2003, the Kotak Group has leveraged technology to fuel its growth and enhance its stature. Soon after savings account interest rates were deregulated in India, the retail banking business of the bank launched a high-yield savings account and followed it up with a highly visible advertising campaign across TV, online and print media to attract new customers. In keeping with times, the bank launched online account opening apart from the conventional process that involved paper forms and required a branch visit. Spanning a web portal for application, telephone calls for clarifications, emails for confirmations and in-person visits for submission of KYC-related documents, Kotak Instant Account was an early adopter of omnichannel banking. According to anecdotal evidence, the bank’s conversion rate of online visitors to customers was on par with industry benchmarks. However, since the bank has traditionally sought to use technology as a differentiator, it was not content with merely matching industry averages. As it was seeking ways to push the envelope on acquiring more customers through the online channel, we introduced our Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) solutions to the bank. In the first phase, we conducted a UX study of Kotak Instant Account. After closely examining the end-to-end account opening process spanning the Internet, email and telephone channels, we spotted several opportunities to minimize friction and otherwise improve the experience of customers as they navigated across webpages, emails and telephone conversations. These included redesign of the account description page, establishing a direct link between a branch name and its street address, varying the content and timing of emails sent during the account opening process, and many more. After implementing our suggestions, the bank has seen a strong uplift in the conversion rate of website visitors to customers.

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This vendor of a SaaS-based marketing automation software suspected that the dull color and geeky-sounding text of the signup button on its website had a negative impact on its customer acquisition. It was deliberating whether to change the button’s color or text or both. In the past, the HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) would have settled this matter. We impressed upon the company to take a scientific approach and use A/B testing to figure out whether changes to the signup button resulted in higher signups and, if so, which changes delivered the greatest sales uplift. Once our suggestion was green lighted, we set up four variants of the vendor’s website with different combinations of color and text of the button. We then ran A/B tests and measured the conversion rate of five versions of the website (original plus four variants). After a couple of weeks, we could ascertain with a high level of statistical significance that the conversion rate of every one of the four variants created by us was higher than that of the original website (5.8%). We eventually selected the best-performing button (conversion rate = 16.7%) which had the same text as the original version but sported a more attractive color. After implementing this version, the vendor saw a 3X jump in new customer acquisition without any increase in ad spend.

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With the combination of a proprietary ASIC processor and a sophisticated algorithm, this American network access control product could detect network behavior anomalies inline and in realtime, something that competing products could not. Accordingly, it was positioned as “NACplus”. This go to market theme was effective in the USA where NAC was well-entrenched in corporate networks, including those that had been using antivirus software and end point security systems for several years. However, this positioning faced several challenges in India, China and many other emerging markets. With much of the market unfamiliar with NAC itself, a NAC+ positioning fell flat and most prospects started comparing the vendor’s product with antivirus software that was available for a fraction of its cost. The vendor tried to address this problem by educating prospects about NAC and how this technology could protect networks from zero-day malware and denial-of-service attacks, neither of which was supported by end point protection solutions. When they heard this argument, most network security managers insisted that their networks never suffered from malware and DoS attacks and immediately ruled out any business case for NAC, let alone NACplus, in their organizations. Confident in the knowledge that threat vectors blocked by its product were universal in nature, the vendor went ahead and committed free trials of its product. At the end of the evaluation period, it used detailed logs to prove that the prospect’s corporate network was indeed subject to several attacks that were, fortunately, thwarted by its product. While this approach settled arguments, it didn’t win many customers. Sales cycles never seemed to end, demo units of the product were fast getting exhausted and customer acquisition was slow. When we stepped in, we recognized how a pitch around NAC+ could estrange network security personnel at whom it was targeted. To get past any political perturbations intrinsic to local business culture, we recommended devising a brand new go to market approach that would appeal to the prospect’s C-Suite who tended to look at a far bigger picture than their network security subordinates. By digging deep into the vendor’s product and success stories, we were able to uncover several strengths and differentiators in the vendor’s overall offering. We then packaged them into a set of Marketable Items around reduction of compliance cost and cutting down contractor onboarding time, which was a top management imperative for many large enterprises in these countries. By resonating immediately and strongly at the right level in prospect organizations, our revised product positioning set the vendor on the path to cut down sales cycle times and boost conversion of leads to deals.

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With the twin mandate of increasing outreach and lowering cost of acquisition for a digital content publisher, we employed a range of digital marketing solutions comprising search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertisements, social media marketing and conversion rate optimization. The Internet Marketing campaign was kicked off with Google AdWords to place the product in front of people having purchase intent and LinkedIn Ads to create visibility for the company among decision makers. Traffic generated by the ads were directed to a dedicated microsite, which provided more information about the product and used our EMAIL360 website leadgen application to capture leads from visitors who were ready to buy. The microsite also promised a free product sample to all visitors who tweeted the page via their Twitter account and followed the vendor on LinkedIn. We configured the Twitter button to add a favorable mention of the product by default to the tweet. This element of social media marketing spread the good word about the product among Twitter Followers and LinkedIn Connections of visitors who took the social media action. Besides, it yielded a pipeline of prospects with whom the vendor could stay in touch via periodic newsletters and social media updates. We constantly monitored the progress of the campaign and finetuned it whenever required so that its overall goals were never missed out in the hustle and bustle of everyday execution. Midcourse interventions included (a) amping up the buzz during the three months of the year that, according to historical data, contributed to almost 60% of annual sales of the product (b) discontinuing the campaign in certain markets that demonstrated a predilection for building products of this nature internally rather than buying them from outside (c) dropping LinkedIn Ads when we found that their higher per click costs were not compensated by better lead quality. In the first twelve months of this still-ongoing campaign, our customer has achieved a manifold increase in sales of its digital content and a return of 364% on its marketing investment.

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Three years and almost a hundred demos later, this Learning Management Software product vendor hadn’t managed to grow its installed base despite having bagged a marquee Non Banking Financial Corporation as its first customer. When we entered the picture, the product seemed to cry out for an urgent change in positioning. The then current positioning – “our product helps streamline and automate IT training in enterprises” – was factually correct and was supported by the manner in which both the NBFC and the vendor itself were using it. However, it didn’t help the vendor in the market place. Almost every prospective customer who heard “training” in the pitch would automatically deflect the vendor to their training department, which would inevitably have limited budget. Although the vendor tried to push its product “top down” by pitching it directly to the C-Suite, its message lacked any sense of mission criticality. Therefore, it wasn’t able to make much headway with sales, marketing, operations and other functions with greater discretionary spending powers. We commenced our engagement and, during the deep dive into the strengths and capabilities of the vendor and its product, discovered that the NBFC customer used the product for much more than IT training. Faced with massive delinquencies in its consumer loans portfolio, the NBFC had hired thousands of salespersons for recovering outstandings from tardy borrowers situated all over India. According to the then prevailing regulation, debt collectors in all industries were required to undergo a training program to learn the “Do’s and Don’ts” of chasing up for outstandings. The NBFC’s sales department found the vendor’s LMS platform to be a great help in conducting this complex, multi-location training program. Instead of the usual three months, the NBFC completed the training in one month, thereby saving millions in payroll costs and recovering its investment in the LMS product in no time. Backed by this high ROI use case, we created a Marketable Item that showcased the LMS product as a means of enabling rapid onboarding of new sales employees into banks and NBFCs, two industries that were hit especially badly by the high delinquent outstanding problem. Our repositioning elevated the value proposition of the LMS product to the next level, thus enabling the vendor to multiply its ticket size – without adding a single new feature to the product. On a side note, one lesson from this engagement was that, when they’re small / unsure of returns, companies seek revshare / variable pricing model whereas once they become big / sure of returns, they shudder at having to part with 20-30% of incremental revenues or reduced costs or enhanced market cap, and insist on fixed pricing model!

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Based out of Wisconsin in the US Midwest, this SAP partner had established a solid reputation in its formative years for providing SAP BASIS services to small and midsize SAP customers directly and via system integrators. To fuel the next phase of its growth, the company realized that it had to go beyond its traditional target market, which was debilitated by the downturn following the GFC. After a bit of introspection, it spotted an internal strength, namely, the presence of many subsidiaries of MNCs within its installed base. Armed with this key differentiator, the company decided to carry out a marketing campaign to target its offerings at large enterprises. When it began to compile a target account list as a prerequisite for launching its email-cum-telephone campaign, the company found that the task would take no less than six months since there was no single database of SAP customers or partners anywhere. Instead of waiting so long, the company decided to kickstart its campaign by purchasing our readymade SAP CUSTOMER LIST and SAP PARTNER LIST. As a result, it was poised to increase its outreach to FORTUNE 1000 corporations in no time at all.

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Optimizely is an American company that provides A/B testing solutions to B2C and B2B websites using a proprietary cloud-based platform. With a highly visible launch, the company was able to attract a massive amount of traffic to its website. When e-tailers, B2B marketers and others website owners among the visitors saw crystal clear descriptions of the basic applications of A/B testing, they could immediately recall a couple of tests they’d been wanting to do for a long time. When they realized how easy it was to conduct these tests using the company’s service, they signed up for free trials instantly. However, after a week or two, most of these customers canceled their subscriptions. It was quite tempting to attribute the mass cancellation to ‘bad quality’ of the service and advise the company’s leadership to enhance the features and otherwise improve the quality of its platform. However, after taking a quick glance at the company’s website, we immediately ruled out any quality-related issues. After a thorough study that included community testing of the service, we were able to identify the root cause of heavy cancellations – as we’d suspected, it’d nothing to do with quality. In reality, since tests of the nature shown on the company’s website took only a few hours / days to complete, most customers finished their top-of-the-mind tests within a week or two. When they didn’t know what to do with the platform during the reminder of its evaluation period, they canceled their subscriptions and moved on. While they left positive feedback on the company’s website about the service’s ease of use – just as we’d also done here and here – they lacked the motivation to become paying customers. We were able to tie in this root cause with our observation that, while the sample test cases given on the company’s website were easy to understand, they didn’t scratch the surface of the solution’s true capabilities. We then devised a new set of test scenarios around alternative navigation paths involved in e-commerce checkout. These tests are capable of telling an e-tailer whether a checkout path featuring two factor authentication truly blocks fraudulent transactions or actually causes revenue loss owing to ‘false positives’. By their very nature, the new set of tests have to be run for weeks before e-tailers can draw conclusions at adequately high confidence levels. Besides, since shopper behavior isn’t uniform all through the year – think of the mad rush around Black Friday and Cyber Monday – e-tailers will need to repeat these tests at different times of the year. With the enhanced usage scenarios supplied by us, the company is now able to provide its customers with compelling reasons to use its service from month to month, enabling predictable revenues.

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This Wall Street investment banker turned media entrepreneur knew from past experience that residency audits could be extremely painful. When summoned for these audits, tax payers with dual residences have to submit details of their physical location for every day over the past several years to substantiate their domicile. Not only does this exercise involve the massive efforts of digging through manual records dating back several years but it is also threatened with failure when such old details turn out incomplete and inaccurate. With calendar and GPS becoming commonplace in smartphones, this entrepreneur was right in assuming that these technologies could be harnessed by a mobile app that could record location information rigorously and securely, thus slashing the efforts of responding to residency audits. However, most mobile app development shops he contacted lacked practical knowledge of such technologies. Enter GTM360. We developed an elegant Android-based mobile app called RAPP360 that records the user’s physical location up to four pre-defined times a day and saves the information in a log file that can be accessed only by supplying a password set by the user. Using our domain expertise, we recognized the level of granularity required by RAPP360 and developed a design that insulated the app from the problem of rapid battery depletion faced by most LBS mobile apps. Armed with RAPP360, our customer is confident of breezing through any residency audits in future.

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Headquartered in Pennsylvania, USA, this IT solutions provider offers geospatial solutions to automotive, chemical, industrial machinery and utility industries located in the East Coast and Midwest regions. With the goal of increasing its outreach in its target market, the company planned to carry out an outbound marketing campaign and was in the market to buy a mailing list of SAP users in the target verticals and geographies. Its sales and marketing leaders immediately found our SAP MAILING LIST appealing – not only does it provide basic telephone and email contact details but our list also includes enriched info such as street address, city, state, zip code and SAP industry vertical. Rightly recognizing that it would take several months’ efforts to compile a similar list internally, the company chose to buy our readymade list and managed to slash the time required to launch its outbound marketing campaign.

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BelladonnaIT, a leading CRM services provider, was very successful in cross-selling a mobile field service automation application to a number of marquee customers for whom it had implemented enterprise CRM solutions. At the same time, the company’s leadership suspected that it was selling the application at a price that didn’t do adequate justice to the tremendous value it delivered to its customers’ field service operations. To redress this situation, GTM360 stepped in and created a Marketable Item that exposed the application’s true value proposition in the context of the exorbitant license fees involved in extending core CRM solutions to an enterprise’s field service operations. We also emphasized other strengths of the software such as its availability in both onpremise and cloud versions and its ability to function even without network signal. The company is now confident of winning deals with larger ticket sizes for the repositioned product and intends to launch an aggressive go to market campaign to grow its pipeline after completing a port to Android.

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We identified application frameworks and domain expertise as key strengths in this IT Services Company. After creating a set of Marketable Items around distance learning and franchisee-based field service automation, we developed email flyers, telescripts, microsites, social media updates, online ads and other types of marketing collateral. By executing traditional outbound marketing campaigns via email marketing and telecalling and modern digital marketing campaigns using online advertising and social media marketing, we helped this company to expand into new geographies.

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With the combination of state-of-the-art technology and solid domain expertise in the IT industry that had the most natural business case for its SaaS-based learning content management system, this vendor was able to acquire many marquee customers in this vertical within the first few years of its inception. However, to take the company’s revenues and market presence to the next level, the company’s executives recognized the need to expand into other industries. The company also found that while its monthly subscription model spurred quicker signups by prospects, it wasn’t able to guarantee steady revenues from customers who didn’t find a compelling reason to renew subscriptions at the end of the month. To help the vendor overcomes its challenges and accomplish its go to market goals, we first packaged the strengths and differentiators of its software to resonate strongly with hot topics and pain areas in three more industry verticals. We then formulated a set of easily implementable measures that could boost usage of the system by existing customers. The vendor is now in a position to launch marketing campaigns targeted at these new industries while being assured of raking in steady revenues from its existing customer base.

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We identified many strengths in this idea management software and created two Marketable Items that packaged these differentiators in such a way that they resonated with hot topics and pain areas faced by high-tech product companies and multilocation enterprises around generation, evaluation and implementation of ideas around new product features, cost reduction, revenue enhancement, and so on. We then developed email flyers, telescript, microsites, social media updates, online ads and other types of marketing collateral. By executing traditional outbound marketing campaigns via email marketing and telecalling and modern digital marketing campaigns using online advertising and social media marketing, we multiplied the company’s outreach and are now well on the way to bolster its sales pipeline.

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To generate leads and expand its market, this US-based SAP staffing solutions provider decided to launch an outbound marketing campaign targeted at SAP customers in the USA. The company could certainly have used its inhouse resources to compile a target mailing list of SAP users. However, its marketers astutely recognized that, in the absence of a single source of information about SAP installed base, it would take them several months before developing a list that was big enough to sustain a meaningful campaign. By buying our readymade SAP MAILING LIST product, the company was able to launch its campaign immediately and accelerate its time to revenues.

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LBTR is a mobile LBS app that went live on the Android Market recently (with an iPhone version coming soon). Our product management services transformed what was a normal graduate school project into an award-winning product that made the grade as a business solution. LBTR permits smartphone users to specify tasks and link them to physical locations on Google Maps. By using GPS, LBTR automatically senses users’ current location and reminds them of pending tasks that are to be performed at that location. The premium version of LBTR allows advertising networks to serve location-specific ads to consumers and enterprises to assign tasks for completion by their employees while they’re at a particular location. Features contributed by GTM360 to LBTR include list of location-dependent everyday tasks, ways to select tasks on a map in a highly frictionless manner, template for task reminders, and many others leading to the overall enhancement of LBTR’s UX. We literally separated these men from the millions of graduate school boys and girls by helping them to win the first prize in two categories at a national symposium and publish their app on the Android Market.

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Sabjiwaala.com is a recently launched startup that is disrupting the vegetable and fruit market by providing the convenience of online ordering and home delivery and the assurance of quality backed by a moneyback guarantee. The sheer novelty of the company attracted huge traffic to its website soon after its launch. However, since online shopping is a new concept in green grocery, very few visitors placed orders on their first visit. It was therefore imperative for the company to reach out to its website visitors and communicate its unique value proposition to them on an ongoing basis before expecting them to become buyers. This meant that the company needed the contact information of its website visitors. While it was easy for the company to put up contact forms on the website to collect any amount of such data, it had to contend with the natural reluctance of most visitors to fill out lengthy forms when they were “just looking around”. GTM360 assured Sabjiwaala.com that their challenge was universal: Research has shown that by trying to collect too much information too soon, most B2C and B2B websites drive away a majority of visitors in what is estimated to be over 60% abandonment rates. We then suggested Sabjiwaala.com to try out our EMAIL360 widget. Once the company appreciated that EMAIL360 could deliver a far better UX compared to the existing forms on its website, it implemented our suggestion immediately. Within days of publishing EMAIL360, Sabjiwaala.com started seeing a sharp uplift in leads collected from its website without any additional SEO / SEM efforts or costs. The company is now well placed to embark upon the journey of converting these leads to deals via special offers and timely response to visitor inquiries.

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Located in the Republic of Mauritius on the Indian Ocean, this state-owned SAP Services Partner has dominant market share among public and private sector enterprises in Africa. To take its revenues and profitability to the next level, the company decided to enter certain Western markets. Since the company has its roots in a French-speaking bilingual nation, it naturally viewed France as the low hanging fruit for its expansion. When its top management invited GTM360 to provide guidance for their market entry into France, we opened their eyes to the buoyant market for SAP services in Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland and other French-speaking nations outside France. We then shared our experience about the pitfalls of trying to enter new markets with messaging created solely around implementation, support, upgrade and other SAP technology service offerings. During a subsequent workshop, we helped the company’s marketing organization to identify its internal strengths and differentiators and map them against industry hot topics and business pain areas in the target markets. We finally custom compiled and supplied a target mailing list of SAP customers to be used by the company’s inside sales organization for launching marketing campaigns targeted at France and other French-speaking nations in Europe.

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Like everyone, this high-tech solutions provider had included a lead form and contact us page on its website. Over a period of six months, the website converted 0.18% of visitors to leads. This barely touched the bottom end of industry standard of 0.2 to 0.3% as reported by leading analysts. Besides, since the existing lead capture methods attracted an overwhelming amount of spam, quality of leads was somewhat suspect. Seeking to boost both the quantity and quality of its leads, the company decided to implement EMAIL360 on its website. EMAIL360’s 1-click action eliminated spam while avoiding confusing CAPTCHA codes. The guaranteed response time displayed prominently on its button encouraged visitors to reach out to the company with the assurance of getting a quick revert. By asking visitors only for their name and email, and letting them submit this information in a smooth and frictionless step that avoided page transition, EMAIL360 made it easy for prospects and customers to contact the company from anywhere on its website. Over the next six months, EMAIL360 worked wonders for the company’s business development efforts by delivering 21 leads, which is 3X more than that received from the website’s existing methods. Coming from 1,486 visitors, this lead volume translated to a conversion rate of 1.4% (21/1486*100%), which trounced industry standards by several times. Since leads delivered by EMAIL360 contain insights into the visitor’s area of interest, the company is now able to route them easily to the most appropriate salesperson, which accelerates the conversion of leads to deals in the next phase of the sales cycle. What’s more, thanks to EMAIL360, the company is no longer bothered by spam.

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This provider of mobile secondary sales application was facing the dual challenges of heavy development efforts and high presales costs on the one hand and low conversion and stunted revenue growth on the other. The company had positioned its product as an automated solution for replacing inefficient paper- and Excel-based based systems typically found in most FMCG and CPG companies. Prospective buyers understood the basic concept of the product well. But they were doubtful if the heavy investment involved in its purchase, implementation and deployment would be justifiable when all it seemed to do was replace their existing systems that had stood the test of time even if they were decidedly ‘low tech’. As a result, while the novelty of the technology pulled in prospects requesting for demos and proofs of concepts, the absence of a clear value proposition reined them back from signing on the dotted line. It was at this stage that we were called in to work out a new go to market strategy for this application. During our deep dive sessions, we spotted a hidden product feature that had the potential to seamlessly expose new store openings to frontline sales staff virtually in realtime. In parallel, our market studies revealed that many FMCG and CPG companies were threatened with a loss of market share owing to delays caused by their paper-based reporting systems in identifying and servicing new stores. We then packaged the key strength of the product as an alleviation of the major pain area of the target market. The resulting Marketable Item gave a brand new and compelling value proposition to the product and propelled it to a manifold higher ticket size. One learning from this engagement was how the same product feature could be viewed drastically differently by vendors and prospects.

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This US Midwestern company develops and markets a software solution that works as an add-on to SAP. To expand its market, the company wished to launch an outbound marketing campaign to generate leads from SAP customers located in the Midwest region of the United States. Although the company had the choice of using their inhouse resources to compile contacts of SAP users, their marketers realized very quickly that there was no single source of information about SAP installed base, so it would take them several months before they could develop a big enough target mailing list with which to launch the campaign. With a view to shortening their time to revenues, the company chose to buy our SAP MAILING LIST product so that they could launch their campaign immediately.

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With capabilities around a few specialized areas in SAP, this boutique SAP consulting company was successful in acquiring several marquee customers in India. Keen on growing its revenues, profits and valuation by expanding abroad, this SAP SERVICES PARTNER engaged us to craft a suitable go to market strategy. Aware of the pitfalls of trying to enter crowded new markets with technology-based offerings, we created a few razor-sharp marketable items that packaged the company’s capabilities and credentials to resonate with industry hot topics and customer pain areas. We then developed specific marketing collateral around each marketable item. Armed with this material, the company’s inside sales team began an email and telephone marketing campaign targeted at existing SAP customers in the UK and Middle East. To its utter surprise, the company got invited by a FORTUNE 500 global corporation to make a presentation of its offerings within one month of launching the campaign! As the company prepares to address this opportunity, its experience speaks to the power of a marketable item to appeal to C-Suites of global corporations and stoke their interest in learning more about an unknown service provider despite having longstanding relationships with Tier-1 incumbent vendors for several years.

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This US job widget maker’s website contains HTML code for job widgets which blog owners download and paste on their blog sites. Blog owners earn revenues when job seekers click through the jobs posted on their blogs. While the website was recording a large volume of visitors and downloads, conversion to job hits was poor. We identified poor usability leading to website abandonment at a crucial step in the process to be the root cause of this issue. By redesigning the process and the associated documentation, we were able to significantly improve conversion of ‘browsers to buyers’. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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A new marketable offering oriented around how payment equipment manufacturers could enhance their revenues by going global resonated well with their internal plans to combat declining revenues in their home markets. As a result, the payments solutions provider’s inside sales team was able to make rapid progress in generating new leads. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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Add-on product packaging helped this Indian ERP vendor establish its Internet-enabled suite of products as second-to-none and thereby bolster sales. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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Using an array of go to market inputs spanning offering creation out of tacit capabilities, collateral development and campaign execution, we built a new PeopleSoft services business from an isolated project for this Indian IT services company. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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Usage-based pricing was the winning differentiator that helped this UK SAP services company break into a leading automobile company despite not being the incumbent vendor. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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This top distributor of leading international brands of servers, desktops and networking products in the Middle East was losing virtually every tender-based deal from the government sector on account of being out priced in relation to its competitors. Decent market share in the equally price-sensitive private sector market ruled out any fundamental issues in competitiveness. The strategy of using a quantitative predictive pricing model paid rich dividend. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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Using sophisticated account management strategy, this Indian services company could cross-sell a completely new service offering into an existing account despite having no product partnership or prior implementation experience. Details (PDF 200KB)>>>

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